The Role of Language in the Future Vision Documents in Transforming the Socio-Political Context in Israel: Lessons from Bilingual Education

This paper examines the socio-political role assigned to Arabic in four position papers published by Arab-Palestinian institutions in Israel and widely known as the Future Vision documents. Proposing a blueprint for conceding more power-sharing, recognition, and equality to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the documents call for an end to the linguistic hegemony of the Jewish majority. Moreover, the documents explicitly advocate for increasing the presence and practice of the Arabic language in the public sphere, both instrumentally as a means for communication and symbolically as an expression of the Palestinians’ cultural and national identity. The documents, as this article reveals, promote bilingualism as a means to change the hierarchical and differentiated regime of citizenship, through which the ethnic dominance of the Jewish majority is maintained. More specifically, the documents propose that the state should adopt bilingualism as the salient characteristic of Israel as a driver to end the Jewish ethnic hegemony and transform Israel into a binational state. While this paper recognizes the prospects for change entailed in bilingualism, drawing on insights from the literature on bilingual education as a tool for conflict resolution, it also argues that these prospects might remain unrealized, without inducing tangible equality and genuine recognition in the minority-majority relations.